Book 2.0 - Volume 4, Issue 1-2, 2014

Since the late 1990s, the technical group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics has worked on solutions for important challenges in building sustainable data archives, in particular, how to guarantee long-time-availability of digital research data for future research.

The support for the well-known DOBES (Documentation of Endangered Languages) programme has greatly inspired and advanced this work, and lead to the ongoing development of a whole suite of tools for annotating, cataloguing and archiving multi-media data. At the core of the LAT (Language Archiving Technology) tools is the IMDI metadata schema, now being integrated into a larger network of digital resources in the European CLARIN project. The multi-media annotator ELAN (with its web-based cousin ANNEX) is now well known not only among documentary linguists.

We aim at presenting an overview of the solutions, both achieved and in development, for creating and exploiting sustainable digital data, in particular in the area of documenting languages and cultures, and their interfaces with related other developments.

Proverbs are a fascinating genre of cultural expression that is studied by folklorists, linguists, philologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, philosophers, logicians, and cognitive psychologists (at least). This multitude of perspectives created in turn a multitude of approaches to how proverbial collections should be organized, classified, and used. These approaches may involve criteria based on alphabetical, chronological, ethnic, geographical, functional, lexicographical, metaphorical, thematic, or stylistic (a partial list) characteristics of proverbial performances. Consequences of this variety of approaches to the classification of subject matter ranged from inconvenience caused by heterogeneous resources to personal discrepancies between scholars.

It is exactly here that digital humanities have another edge on traditional humanities. Contemporary information technologies increasingly allow to store data without commiting in advance to how it is structured when used. If in traditional publishing the order of lexicographical entries and their content is predefined, digital publishers can use such technologies as relational databases, data warehouses, semantic ontologies, or faceted search, in order to implement flexible access to data that can satisfy even most exotic research demands.

In the proposed contribution I overview traditional challenges, suggest their domain-independent analysis in the perspective of ‘the big data challenge’, and describe some present achievements and future directions.

This article documents the progress of the Cambridge Shahnama Project, initiated in 1999, and some of the issues that had to be addressed in implementing its ambitious aim to provide an open access, online corpus of illustrations of scenes from the Persian Book of Kings. This epic poem, Firdausi’s Shahnama, completed in ad 1010, was copied in thousands of manuscripts that are now dispersed in collections throughout the world, many of them lavishly illustrated: together, they provide a rich base of material for studying the arts of the book in Persian culture over several centuries, and the reception of Firdausi’s poem. The focus is on the development of the database and its transformation into a website, and the experience of applying appropriate technology to research in the humanities. The article identifies several phases of the project, up to its recent success in attracting a substantial endowment that will permit the work to continue for the foreseeable future.

This article takes as its point of focus the work of book artist Helen Douglas. Douglas’ The Pond at Deuchar of 2011 is a hand scroll, measuring 14 metres long and printed on Chinese paper in small edition. Rendered digitally as a prototype iPad app, the 2012 version of The Pond at Deuchar has the potential to become widely available to new readers. At the same time, it radically alters our experience of the work as screen replaces paper and new gestures replace the act of rolling and unrolling. In its digital rendering there is, perhaps, nothing but surface, except that zoom technology enables a more immersive engagement of sorts. It is a focus upon surface, however, that underscores the tension between virtual and visceral, analogue and digital, page and screen. That surface becomes the site of our imagining and, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, ‘the place of a taking-place’. At once reassessing and reaffirming the paper scroll, Douglas’ iPad app offers restitution to the idea of the book, or scroll, providing new modes of engagement and a new surface to explore. Here each form of the work supports the other, while informing our understanding of both.

The casebooks of the fellow astrologer-physicians Simon Forman and Richard Napier, covering the period 1596–1634, are among the largest and richest medical archives in history. The Casebooks Project is making them accessible online to both specialist and non-specialist users in a way that would be completely impossible in a print edition. This paper describes the nature and significance of the archive, the challenges involved in interpreting and encoding it, and the strategies we have developed to meet those challenges. In particular, it focuses on the task of making the material comprehensible to a modern audience while remaining true to the structure and terminology of the original documents.

Language Landscape (LL) is a non-profit organization set up by a group of postgraduate linguistics students in 2011. It comprises of an interactive online map (languagelandscape.org), which is the main focus of this article, and educational outreach projects. The LL Mapping model relies not on representing languages per se, but rather on using instances of language use as data points. This method can be particularly useful for mapping language variation and multilingualism, especially in urban contexts. Through digitization, LL reaches a wide audience of educators, primary and secondary school students, university students, academic researchers, minority and endangered language communities and finally, social media users.

This article is a study of literary mediation in the age of the e-book. It focuses on a specific editorial project being undertaken by scholarly editors in the present day, when the late age of print is giving way to the digital age. The author argues that the present moment represents a deceptively strong period for print publishing, but an uncertain and experimental period for literature, a time when the values and practices that order the literary field are no longer well-defined. The spread of digital culture is reconfiguring the make-up of the reading public, shaping readers as ‘prosumers’ who at once consume and manipulate content. Just as importantly, hyper-mediation and media convergence are forcing critics to confront an ‘unbinding of the book’ that began in practice decades before the Internet age. As professional mediators, editors occupy an ideal position to register the opportunities and the pressures of these processes, whether they are literary entrepreneurs or scholars implicated in literature as an institution. Their efforts to delimit literary texts and sell them as a particular kind of cultural institution show how the game of literature and its rules of play change shape under the pressures of new media configurations and new social worlds.

An overarching goal of the Instructional Technology Programme at the University of Houston has been to help students in our graduate courses learn technology skills by involving them in web-based ‘Digital Humanities Projects’ with local non-profit organizations. In this article, we discuss the benefits and challenges associated with the collaborative design, development and evaluation of real-world projects with community stakeholders serving as clients. Over the past decade, we have developed and used Webscapes, a theoretical model that serves as the framework for the creation of these projects. We define Webscapes as information landscapes, delivered over the web, which include a rich variety of content; challenging, cognitive explorations; intuitive navigation structures; and user-oriented interfaces. We describe the characteristics of the model and include reflections from students and community partners about accomplishments and challenges they faced. We also provide examples and discussion of Webscape projects, several of which have been completed, two that are ongoing and one that is in the early stage of development.

How to Read a Shakespearean Play Text, Eugene Giddens (2011) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 198 pp. ISBN: 9780521713976, p/bk, £16.99, ISBN: 9780521886406, h/bk, £45